The closest that the gameplay comes to elegantly and seamlessly pairing with the overarching story occurs in such places, where Ellie and Dina feel safe enough to sing to each other, or talk about old movies, comic books they’ve found, their families, and the like. An abandoned music store isn’t just a depository for ammo and health items, with a few records strewn around, but a place that felt as if it was desperately looted during an apocalypse and now has been overtaken by vines and serves as a sanctuary for those who should need it.
Entire neighborhoods feel like real, once-lived-in places, frozen in time, derelict and overgrown.
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The starting and end points of any given area are largely set in stone, but you can wander the ruins of Seattle across a wide expanse, and there’s an impressive number of fully rendered and true-to-life locations that you’re free to explore. Most of the gameplay takes place in a semi-open world that recalls that of Naughty Dog’s underrated Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Ellie and Dina in a scene from The Last of Us Part II. Do you take out your enemies with a shiv or a switchblade? Do you have the materials for a makeshift silencer? Are you so overloaded with ammo that you can afford to get loud? Or do you just make a mad dash for an exit, praying that the door isn’t blocked? Once you have set your goal, the overall approach to achieving it is up to you, and that’s a massive and welcome improvement over the first game.
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Being prepared and armed to the teeth is the real deciding factor here, and the player is given much more freedom to figure out how to best accomplish that. You’re still best served by sneaking around enemies instead of facing them directly, but unlike the first game, you’re also not utterly doomed by choosing to face them head-on. And just like most of Naughty Dog’s forays into cinematic action games, what goes on in the cutscenes is only tenuously connected with everything going on in the rest of the campaign.Īs a gameplay experience, The Last of Us Part II brings just the right amount of that Uncharted-like intensity into its every set piece. That’s even more egregious given that the story could have been just as effective without the game’s utter realism being an imperative by any means necessary, especially given the despicable, and well-documented, human cost of achieving that level of detail. As in the original, you sneak, scavenge, shoot, stab, and bludgeon your way through the world, and The Last of Us Part II is home to some of the most ferocious acts of sinewy, effective, and affecting violence in a video game, and they’re made all the more lurid and visceral by being rendered in unparalleled detail that’s consistent with the rest of the story. That, though, is still a hard ask for a game like this. This is a game that asks players to accept the multitudes of its heroes, its villains, and every other poor, suffering soul that Ellie and Dina encounter throughout their journey, about what it means to be another monster among monsters, and what purpose that grotesquery serves. If it was, the game’s violence wouldn’t be necessary, justified, or cathartic-and killing here is often all three of those things at once. Which isn’t to say that The Last of Us Part II gets too high and mighty about the ugly, gratuitous nature of revenge.
And, of course, the underlying message of the whole thing, belabored by so many zombie stories before this one, is that humans are the real monsters, and that it takes a certain innate viciousness to survive in a world of monsters. And all the while, the Cordyceps epidemic continues to roil, making new, hideous, screeching monsters by the day, and in even more horrifying, hard-to-kill forms than before. Yes, of course, Ellie goes after Joel’s killers, a hunt that leads her-along with her ride-or-die girlfriend, Dina-to Seattle, where the militia is embroiled in a bloody civil war with an urban-agrarian pseudo-Christian cult known as the Seraphites. And the first and most expected of those consequences occurs not even an hour into The Last of Us Part II, when, four years after the events of the first game, a small militia manages to snatch Joel, and his surrogate daughter, after coming to his rescue, watches him meet a particularly grisly end.
No matter how one felt about Joel, the grizzled protagonist of the 2013 game, it was inevitable that his actions-saving 14-year-old Ellie’s life at the expense of the human race-would have consequences. The moment that Naughty Dog announced a sequel to The Last of Us, we knew a day of reckoning was coming. Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers.
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